gotohealth's Blog

A few years ago, 2010, I was having lunch with my cousin, Don Tsukamaki, on a trip to Portland from where I live in the Seattle area. He said, “Do you know how poor you were growing up?!” His father was my Mom’s younger brother and their family had done a lot to help my parents with gifts and finances.

 

Part of the reason we were so poor was because Dad was not entrepreneurial. He played his harmonica, violin and musical saw. He built all the beautiful furniture we had - dining table, chest of drawers, desk - in his high school carpentry class. He built our one-room farm house. He was not a good farmer, at a time when that was the only occupation available to those with Japanese heritage during WWII. Dad was a born-again Christian and went to church and didn’t work 7 days a week to get ahead. Visiting Joe Saito, he said, “Your dad was known for telling us to stop smoking!”

 

My father, Sago (likely anglicized from Seigo a famous samurai warrior) Miyamoto, was born 1908. He was born to Grandpa, Kanekichi, and Grandma, Yoshi Miyamoto; immigrants from Hiroshima, Japan. Kanekichi was head of “Jap Camp” for Eatonville Lumber Company and Yoshi did laundry for the workers. Dad was sent back to Japan for a few years during his grade school years and hated it. American Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) were treated as foreigners in Japan and not treated well by neighbors and fellow students. Dad graduated from Eatonville, WA, high school around 1927 and went to the U of Minnesota in St Paul. 

 

By the year 1936, there was talk of war, and his parents decided they had made enough money in America to go back to Japan. Left penniless, in hopes that Dad would follow, my dad remained very resentful and I knew nothing about his family until years later, doing research. 

 

That same year, 1936, my Mom, who had been sent to Hiroshima with her three younger brothers to live with their Grandpa J Tsukamaki, because their mother had died, were coming back to America because of national political unrest. Mom’s dad, K Tsukamaki, owed K Miyamoto money - likely because of the discrimination and hard times when Japanese Dairy Farmers were run out of the business due to the 1921 Alien Land Law passed by the Washington legislators. K Miyamoto said if my Mom, Mary, would marry my Dad, Sago, the debt would be forgiven. 

 

By 1947, Mom’s Dad and two brothers, Ben and Frank, had established the ONTARIO FISH MARKET in Ontario, Oregon, where the Mayor, Elmo Smith, had welcomed over 800 Japanese leaving Minidoka incarceration - unlike other towns in that Idaho/Oregon community along the Snake River, not far from Boise, Idaho.

 

Dad sold his 30 acre Caldwell, Idaho, farm and became the FISH MAN; delivering groceries with his panel truck to the farmers starting over with row crop farming when they didn’t have a car, money or time. Dad loved to talk and help; distributing a lot of the unsold food items to the poor - along with the community news to the housewives as he carried the groceries to their kitchen and got paid.